En 20-a Aug de 2004-a jaro, Robin Lee Powell(lojban-out@lojban.org) skribis: > On Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 09:33:59AM +0100, Zefram wrote: > > I've just read a newpaper article about the Piraha group of Amazonian > > Indians and their amazing language. > > http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040820/NUMBERS20/TPSci > > It is being specifically touted as potential S-W proof. Don't take it too easy! I found the article quite paradoxical. First, you have to ensure they are Homo Sapiens and do not have in-tribe genetic problem, which is easily diluted once having contacted with other tribes, to make them cognitively impossible to understand the concept of counting. Second, it is often read in early science fiction, declaming some tribe to be easily starve to death when enough food is available. The tribe might well disapear before any anthropologist could have found them. Third, it is paradoxical if they have taboos but not myths. And taboos are themselves expected to be kept more then "two generations". I haven't yet looked it up in the LBA database. Googling seems to be enough for me. In one interview with Daniel Everett[1], he reported the _amazing_ feature which is now quite familiar among linguists. "The language ... [has] 'evidentials', ... which the speaker uses to support the subject and explain whether he or she saw it, overheard it or deduced it." Despite the aspects of conjugation being likely optional in a conversation (as you may as well express in English explicitly: I saw, I heard people said, I think), if some language has this kind of feature, it has to be a human language as far as linguists can tell. And once they can tell 'few' from 'more', there is no reason for them to have at least a simple numerical system including one, two and more. Such "oneist, twoist" mentioned in the article is simple ein Quatsch. I'm not saying the S-W hypothesis is proven false or something. But a early claim about not being able to tell orange from yellow by some tribes having the same word for the two colours is now known to be falsified. S-W hypothesis may be partially true, as far as the tribes with one term are reported simply not caring about the distinguish of the colours. BTW, the information about psychologist Peter Gordon is not easy to find. Found one in Forskningsseminarer ved Psykologisk Institutt: 24.02.99 Peter Gordon (language psychologist): "The emergence of argument structure in language acquisition". I found nothing in Columbia U (maybe I leaked something). I can't find where Ray Jackendoff said something about Piraha. The only article with keywords "Ray Jackendoff piraha" is a paper written by Daniel Everett himself [2], where he said he told Peter Gordon that the tribe has no numbers. He admits there that this is not "quite convincing." Actually, "culturally constrained" (in his part of abstract) is a term often used by cognitive linguistics. But what they claim to be constrained is never something like 'productivily', 'exchangeability', 'displacement', which are linguistic essential. I found all claims in the article in Globe and Mail sourced from this paper. This paper could be a big-bang for the linguistics. However it is not. [1] http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/issues/29/030697/19.html [2] http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/cultgram.pdf -- Sie sammeln und wissen nicht, wer es kriegen wird. (Psalm 39:7)
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